It was while she was attending the 1956 Cannes Film Festival that stunning British Rank starlet Belinda Lee was spotted by Italian producers. The following year when she was shooting The Goddess of Love in the leading role as Aphrodite, the married actress had an affair with the equally married aristocrat Prince Filippo Orsini, a papal prince and member of Roman high society. It was a relationship that struck horror into the heart of the Vatican. The couple’s alleged attempts at suicide made headlines in those dolce vita years. After being smuggled into South Africa to make romantic adventure Nor the Moon By Night, Lee continued to make films in Europe, with directors like Francesco Rosi and Damiano Damiani, co-starring with everyone from Charles Aznavour and Daniel Gelin to Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni in everything from realistic dramas, comedies and historical melos to serious arthouse, romances and colourful peplums.
The novelist Joy Packer whose book had been the source of that South African-set Rank film, said of Lee: Her hips were a little too big and her legs not quite enough for true grace, but what one noted was the beauty of her green cat-titled eyes, her mane of red-gold hair and the young firm contours of her throat and bosom. She was quiet and composed, easy to talk to, with a sleepy well-educated voice … She had a way of tossing her hair constantly as if she could not forget it… She was unaware of Africa, unaware of her surroundings or her job except when she was actually performing. People said that she was unapproachable. Perhaps she was, because she was wrapped in the shining cocoon of an illicit love affair. Her heart and soul were in Rome with her forbidden lover. Lee was just 22 at the time.
An almost unparalleled beauty, she was a very talented performer whose career was never properly nurtured in her home country where she had trained at RADA. She despised the typecasting that characterised her early career despite earning leading roles by her fourth film, Murder by Proxy and being voted 10th Most Popular Film Star by British film exhibitors in 1957 (the rest were men). Outside Britain she was treated as a cross between Sophia Loren and Melina Mercouri while unintentionally cultivating that reputation for scandal and notoriety via the tabloids and the feverish paparazzi. She said, I changed the day I got to Rome. One day I was a quiet English girl – the next I was a woman. What a time I had and how the Italian men love us actresses.
She is remembered today in her Devon hometown of Budleigh Salterton where a blue plaque is being unveiled at her former home, Cliff House, 10 Cliff Terrace.
Dr Phil Wickham, curator of the University of Exeter’s Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, said of the occasion: It is tremendous news that a blue plaque will now celebrate the life of Belinda Lee in her hometown. She is a fascinating figure who deserves to be better known. She was a star in two film industries who challenged the ways in which women were constrained in the post-war years. We are proud that she came from Devon and this plaque will help her to be remembered.
The changed role of women in society has prompted a re-evaluation of her life and aspirations in today’s more tolerant age. Lee appeared in much more overtly sexual roles than British producers had ever contemplated for her. In the Britain of the 1950s she was limited by a stereotype of demure and unthreatening beauty that fitted expectations of femininity at the time, at least for middle-class young women. The British press disapproved of her Italian career and private life, condemning Lee for being open about her desires. If she had lived perhaps she would have better fitted into the changing ethos of the 1960s.
She died tragically young in a car crash on Highway 91 just outside San Bernardino, California, 12th March 1961 with then fiance, filmmaker Gualtiero Jacopetti, who survived and dedicated his mondo documentary Women of the World, to her memory. She was all kinds of fabulous.
Lee is buried in the Cimitero Acatollico in Rome and she bequeathed £20,000 in the form of scholarships to the city’s Centre for Experimental Cinematography.
I might as well cash in on the notoriety I have got. It won’t last. I just want to live. I just want to have a good time.
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